Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
When you hear “Sicily” what’s the first thing you think of? If you’re like most people, the immediate association is “Mafia.” To be sure, the island has suffered, for hundreds of years, the peculiar gangster- government collaboration known now as “Mafia,” yet Sicily has a rich history that long antedates that organization.
In the beginning were the Greeks, who dominated Sicily for five hundred years. As it is the classical sites that bring most tourists to Sicily, I have described some of the architecture still visible (after two-thousand-plus years) and the political and economic conditions that gave rise to those temples and fortifications.
The trimillennial drama continued with protagonists from three continents: the Romans from the Italic peninsula occupied Sicily for six hundred years, followed by the Vandals and Goths from north- eastern Europe and the Byzantines from westernmost Asia. Then Muslims from North Africa came to Sicily and diffused their advanced culture and agriculture. The Normans from what is today northwestern France introduced the Sicilians to feudalism and to the ideas of parliament and responsible government. A scion of the Normans, Frederick, while king of Sicily was also Holy Roman Emperor and one of Europe’s most complex sovereigns ever.
As Europe developed nation-states, Sicily was occupied by the aggrandizing Spanish. The houses of Savoy and of Hapsburg ruled Sicily for brief periods, then the Spanish took over again as the Bourbon dynasty. Giuseppe Garibaldi won Sicily from the Bourbons and made it part of a new Kingdom of Italy. After World War II, Sicily was ruled briefly by the Americans and the British — that was a novelty for the Americans, though the British had been instru- mental in running Sicily off and on for centuries.
So had the outlaws, if not for quite so long. This book will con- sider how the serial foreign occupation helped to create an environ- ment in which the Mafia sprouted.
Many regions of the world, indeed other regions of Italy, experienced similar invasions, resettlement, and foreign rule, without subjecting themselves to Mafia-like domination. So in Sicily additional forces must have been at work. Climate and topography inevitably influence the character of a people, and we shall see how they did so for Sicilians. In a word, wheat. Dry, hilly Sicily supports few crops; wheat was the staple of the classical Mediterranean diet, and Sicilians cultivating their hard wheat needed little initiative or industry. This fostered the poverty and passivity that traditionally characterized the island.
In consequence, the ambitious emigrated. In recent centuries Sicily has been unusual among nations in the high proportion of its resi- dents who moved abroad. Emigration not only took Sicilian prac- tices to other lands, it also significantly changed the lives of people who remained on the island.
These forces, tightly interwoven, go a long way toward explaining Sicily and the Sicilians. Most books on Sicily deal primarily with the fine arts or with religious life, but I have hardly touched on them. I have focused rather on the economic and demographic aspects of Sicily’s story. This book is a general history, an account of welfare and warfare. Within it I have highlighted certain threads that run through the centuries: Sicily’s particular patterns of land use and landholding, and Sicily’s unique relationship with the church. Sicily’s character has also been determined by the lack of influence from events that affected Europe generally, namely the Crusades and Columbus’s discovery of America.
Sicily is known for its Mafia and its emigration. Note the develop- ment of banditry and corruption forerunning the modern Mafia, but note too that the problem of the Mafia in today’s Sicily is something different from foreigners’ common perception. Likewise, the high emigration from Sicily overshadows the importance of its immigra- tion. Besides the several peoples who ruled Sicily — essentially those in this book’s chapter titles — other peoples participated in Sicily’s story, among them Jews and Ligurians and Albanians. All are ances- tors of modern Sicilians. Having found their study fascinating, I invite you to come and meet them.
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Lipari
W
arnings against going to Sicily have been broadcast for a long time. Just listen to Homer, as he talks about the strait
that separates Sicily from the mainland:
On the western side you’ll see a big flowering fig tree, below which is the lair of Charybdis. He vomits thrice daily, then gulps down copious amounts of the waters. Don’t be caught near Charybdis at those hours, or he’ll swallow you and your ship. On the opposite side of the strait, where the banks are higher, you’ll see a rock so smooth that it appears polished. In a cave halfway up that rock lives a monster called Scylla with the body of a dog, but with six necks and six heads. Each of its mouths has three rows of overlapping teeth, which it uses to grab six men from every passing ship.
Scylla and Charybdis sound just as frightening as the Mafia. Today’s visitor to Sicily may be reassured to know that he is no more likely to be killed by the Mafia than by Homer’s monsters.
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Homer didn’t claim to have seen the beasts himself; he was organ- izing and telling some stories of his people. The team of Scylla and Charybdis was a fanciful explanation for the very real shipwrecks
frequent at the northeast tip of the island. As Homer lived in Asia Minor and narrated these stories around 730 B.C., we know that the accounts of sailings to Sicily were then familiar in ports of the eastern Mediterranean — over a thousand miles distant.
The Greeks called it Trinacria, the three-pointed island. We infer from Homer that the island was known not only to sailors but to a broader population: in his war poem The Iliad, he refers casually to the story of Daedalus, in a way that assumes his audience to be familiar with the place. Daedalus — not quite so well known at our time and place — went to Sicily but avoided the straits. Having killed someone in his homeland, Athens, he fled to Crete. There he con- structed the Minotaur’s labyrinth and generally worked with such originality that the king refused to let him leave. So Daedalus built wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son, Icarus, and they soared away. But the boy flew too close to the sun, his wax melted, and he fell to his death. Daedalus continued to glide, occasionally descending to dip his wings in the water to cool them, until he reached Sicily. So if you are thinking of an escape to Sicily, you aren’t the first. Daedalus flew there too.
Sicily became the landing place in that story probably because of its location plunk in the middle of the Mediterranean, which gave the island a central location in the civilized world. At the time of Homer, scaremongers notwithstanding, seamen kept bringing boats safely into Sicily from all around the Mediterranean. Some of their passengers did business in Sicily and then departed, while other pas- sengers remained and developed communities. During the same decades that Homer was becoming the first author in the Western world, Greece was establishing her first colonies on the Sicilian mainland.
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Before making our tour of those colonies, though, we’ll visit Lipari, a small island off Sicily’s north coast. Today you reach Lipari from Messina by taking a train west for an hour to Milazzo and then a boat northwest for an hour. Yet visiting Lipari is less a trip through space than through time. Homer lived some twenty-seven hundred
years before us; if we go back twenty-seven hundred years before Homer, we’ll find Lipari already flourishing.
Homer heard tales of Lipari that were already ancient. Seafarers told him of this island where the people worked a hard rock to make various kinds of blades. The stone workers claimed to be the island’s first inhabitants, having found it empty when they arrived from the Sicilian mainland. But the Greeks who returned from Lipari, recalling how they had shivered there, saw its past differently: here lived and ruled the god of the winds, Aeolus. Homer tells the story of the Ithacan king Odysseus landing on Lipari. When he was about to depart, Aeolus offered him a wine bag of wind to speed his voyage, and Odysseus stowed it in the hold of his ship. Nine uneventful days at sea brought the ship within sight of Ithaca, so close they could see the fires on shore. The crew, meanwhile, had been eyeing that wine bag and speculating about its contents: doubt- less some valuable gift from Aeolus that Odysseus didn’t intend to share. So the men untied the bag, the winds escaped, and a storm arose that drove their ship all the way back to Aeolus.
The Greeks called the island Aeolia; it’s the largest of a group of islands now known as both “Aeolian” and “Lipari.” Had Odysseus remained on Aeolia, he would doubtless have joined the men there in working the hard volcanic rock, obsidian.
This obsidian was born of an eruption of the volcano Monte Pelato, in Aeolia’s northeast, around 7000 B.C. Generations passed, into the period we call neolithic. On the big island of Sicily people were begin- ning to plant crops and raise animals, but they still obtained food through gathering and hunting. Those who went to seek food in the mountains behind Sicily’s north coast could, in clear weather, see small islands in the distance and doubtless wondered if food might be easier to find on those islands. But for a long long time they couldn’t get there to investigate. Eventually, sometime during the fifth millennium B.C., they improved their boats and navigational techniques sufficiently to send out a few of their most intrepid explorers, who discovered some of Lipari’s appealing features: it was unpopulated, certain parts were extremely fertile, and in the northeast part of the island large areas
were covered by shiny black rocks with edges of greater sharpness than anything they had ever seen before. The explorers decided to fetch their friends.
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The neolithic era is the period when humans used stone implements. They used a lot of flint, as it is relatively easy to shape. Although flint is very hard, neolithic persons found that by pressing a stone or a bone against a piece of freshly dug flint they could make its edges flake off and in so doing sharpen an edge for cutting. Obsidian, having natural sharp edges, required less work to make a knife, so the people of Lipari brought it into use alongside flint. The new islanders turned pieces of obsidian into cutting tools and before long (just a few centuries) they had an export industry.
The Lipari craftsmen became skilled in working obsidian, but the demand for their product had less to do with their skill than with the scarcity of the raw material. A few other volcanic Mediterranean islands had small quantities, but Lipari had by far the largest supply. Although obsidian is a product of volcanic eruption, most volcanic eruptions yield no obsidian. Obsidian is that rare lava that cooled very quickly, into a kind of natural glass; usually lava is exploded by hot air, making pumice, a light-colored, lightweight substance for which prehistoric man had no use. But apparently he could use all the obsidian implements he could get, certainly all that Lipari could produce. The location of Lipari in the center of the Mediterranean facilitated the transport of the heavy product. Craftsmen streamed into Lipari — so many that some of the newcomers had to settle and practice their trade on nearby smaller islands. In the Mediterranean basin during the neolithic era, the Aeolian archipelago was a major population center, and Lipari a boom town.
As I type away at my computer, beside it on my desk stands a three- kilo hunk of obsidian. The laptop, matte black, symbolizes interna- tional commerce of our time. The obsidian, its shiny black brightened by straight, narrow white lines running irregularly through it, repre- sents international commerce at its very beginning. Neolithic man wanted sharp tools for cutting his animals and his enemies. Obsidian
was the sharpest workable material he knew, and most obsidian came from Lipari, so Lipari enjoyed a seller’s market. For some seventeen hundred years.
That was around 4500–3000 B.C. But more significant than the when is the where: notwithstanding the fertility of her lavic soil, Lipari’s strong winds precluded the growth of grain sufficient to feed the population. The migrants from the mainland had to spend much of their time fishing, seizing sea-animals and wild birds, gathering wild fruits, and trying to eke what crops they could out of the land. Of course the obsidian producers added to their alimentary stocks by their trade. The food and drink naturally arrived in containers, most of them ceramic.* Neolithic people used ceramics for pots and drinking cups, for statues and construction elements, and for con- tainers of all kinds — for them ceramic was as multiform and as
ubiquitous as plastic is for us.
At a remove of fifty centuries, and despite the fragility of ceramic ware, many thousands of pieces of early pottery can now be exam- ined on Lipari. The archaeologists who study the pieces of pottery know how to read them like words in books — from the form of a piece they usually know how it was used, and from the form and decoration they usually know where it was made and when. The scholars move from provenance to foreign trade, for having deter- mined the kind or kinds of ceramics produced in a given locality, they can attribute the discrepant pieces to foreign production. The foreign pieces indicate either the presence of foreign peoples or com- merce with them. Archaeologists collectively can determine the provenance of most pottery pieces. Pottery is therefore important not only as work of art but also as document about the movement of peoples.
The ceramics found on Lipari claim special attention because Lipari produced relatively little pottery. The soil being lava-based, it lacked clay. When the islanders made pottery using just the local
* Pottery and ceramics are synonyms, at least as regards pieces made through the Middle Ages (when pottery generally refers to a simpler earthenware than ceramics).
kaolin soil, the result was poor. They imported clay from the north coast of Sicily to mix with the local kaolin soil and made other pieces more successfully. Lipari residents used a great deal of pottery made by other peoples.
Fragments found on Lipari are among the oldest known from the Mediterranean area. Some pieces have elegantly incised and stamped decorations of a type characteristic of the culture of Stentinello. Stentinello, probably Sicily’s earliest agricultural society, had its base in southeast Sicily. The ceramics found on Lipari suggest that the first settlers there originated in Stentinello and drifted up to Sicily’s north coast. They would be the first known group of Sicilian migrants…
